Thursday, May 21, 2009

SPEED Handles Thursday Live From Lowe's

The SPEED team is handling the Thursday coverage from Lowe's Motor Speedway of a full day of on-track activity.

On the air at noon, the coverage begins with a one hour version of NASCAR Live hosted by John Roberts. The day ends with Sprint Cup Series qualifying at 7PM featuring the NASCAR on Fox announce team.

SPEED is very comfortable at LMS, which is right down the road from the new SPEED TV headquarters and studios. Almost all the SPEED crew is at the track for this day of coverage.

This post will serve to host any comments you may have about the SPEED coverage of the Thursday activities from LMS. To add your TV-related opinion, just click on the comments button below. This is a family-friendly site, please keep that in mind when posting.

Its about time SPEED cares to do some Thursday coverage. This gets pushed to the side on alot of tracks like Texas that have plenty of activity on Thursday, but SPEED apparently doesn't feel they need to cover it.

Wow, that was certainly interesting TV to see Randy Pemberton have the courage to ask Terry Cook how much time he would be spending in race trim during final Nationwide practice. It's certainly a fair question to ask, and I do hope Terry wasn't trying to intentionally dance around the start-and-park issue with his answer and that team is actually there to race this weekend.

IF this is another planned start-and-park for them though I just have to wonder:

a.) if NASCAR openly endorses this practice as a completely acceptable part of the sport why are people still trying to cover it up and hide from it?

and

b.) why not take that tremendous opportunity for TV time to explain your situation on the air, point out your team's potential, and make a pitch for a sponsor that could let them run all day?

@anon 3:01--they mentioned it during the NA$CAR Live show when I was on lunch. I've had to have the laptop on mute since we have to be in a quiet environment so I don't know if they mentioned it again on the later shows.

I was trying to figure out the delay as well. I'm getting tweets about only 4 more locked in cars to go and there were like 12 more to go on TV. JD can you confirm if the delay is because they show all qualifiers and still get commercials? I'll have to start watching to see if I can tell that information as well.

It sure was good to see sponsors on the 66, 71, and 87 cars during the qualifying broadcast today. Major kudos to Mike Joy and the production crew for making the extra effort to give those sponsors extra on-air mentions and TV exposure today.

stricklinfan82, I would guess that Nascar does endorse the start and park cars. Why? Because if they didn't, I would guess the races would be run with far less than 43 cars. At least with the start and parks, Nascar can brag that they have full fields, despite the fact that a number of them drop out in less than 10 laps.

BTW, in case anyone is interested, there's a great front page article on the state of Nascar, including the huge ratings drop. Take a look to read more on the head in the sand comments by King Brian France.